The Persuader

Warde Manuel makes believers out of skeptics, convincing
them of UB's potential to become an athletic force without
compromising academics

Story by Nicole Peradotto : Photo by Paul Hokanson

Warde Manuel has two postgraduate degrees.
He's been published in respected academic journals.
Earlier this year, he was designated one of the sharpest
young executives in the sports business industry.
But ask volleyball player Katherine Love what
impresses her about UB's athletic director, and she'll
tell you it's the fact that he's been there.

“It's awesome to have someone who's been in Division
I sports because he knows the ups and downs that we
go through,” the senior communications major says.
“If ever we need someone to talk to about it, we know
we can talk to him because he's been there.”

In Manuel's case, “there” was on the defensive line of
the storied University of Michigan Wolverines football
team. While the credentials and experience he accumulated
since then have informed his philosophy on
leading UB's athletics department, his turf time in the
late 1980s also shapes his vision for the 500-plus student
athletes who sport the Bulls' royal blue jerseys.

“The expectation is that we're not going
to shy away from academics or make
excuses about what your academic performance
is because of sports,” says the
40-year-old New Orleans native. “I tell my
recruits, 'If you don't want to do that—if
you don't want to be the best academically
and athletically—then this is not the place
for you.'

“And what we've shown is that we can
do both. We've had tremendous academic
success and tremendous—compared to
what we had before—athletic success.”

As they say in the broadcasting booth,
the scoreboard never lies. A highlights
reel of the past season would necessarily
feature footage of the football team, which
claimed a share of the Mid-American
Conference (MAC) East title for the first
time; men's soccer, which reached the
MAC finals for the second time; and women's
tennis, the first Division I program in
UB history to qualify for an NCAA team
championship.

Less obvious to fans are the academic
gains the Bulls have made under Manuel's
leadership. According to the most recent
report from the NCAA's Academic
Progress Rate, 15 of the 20 teams showed
improvement from 2005–2006 to
2006–2007.

To Manuel, both sets of stats confirm
what he's been saying since he first
stepped into Alumni Arena: that UB
has the potential to become an athletic
force, and do so without compromising
academics.

“We struggled with negative attitudes
a bit when I first came here. People didn't
believe that we could be successful. But
now people are starting to believe, and not
only internally. Now you can see that out
in public—that people are proud of what
we're accomplishing.”

Equal plaudits for academic success

A firm advocate for both sides of the
scholar-athlete equation, Manuel is as
proud of students' academic accomplishments
as their athletic feats. When two
members of the Bulls football squad were
selected in the NFL draft last April, he
called to congratulate them. And when a
senior soccer player walked into his office,
bursting with the news that she'd been
accepted into graduate school, he gave her
a big hug.

“That's the excitement—seeing kids
succeed,” he says. “It opens a lot of doors
for them.”

Having been a student athlete himself,
Manuel is drawn to the drive of the generation
that succeeds him. Yet he recognizes
that their passion for playing often breeds
unrealistic ambitions. “In sports that have
professional opportunities, everybody thinks they're going pro,” he says. “They
can be sitting so far back on the bench
that they're in the last row, and in some
way they think they're going pro.

“The reality is, we want kids like that,
who have dreams and aspirations. So I
never say, ‘You're not going to play professional
sports.' I'm not going to kill
anybody's dream. But I'm saying, ‘When
sports are over, what are you going to
do?'”

When injury struck Manuel during his
intercollegiate football career, he had to
ask that question of himself.

Playing under a legendary coach

As a child, Manuel always had a glove,
bat or ball in his hand. But he made the
biggest impression on the football field.
During his senior year of high school, the
6-foot-5-inch defensive end was named
a first-team consensus All-American in
his position—the best of the best. He was
wooed by so many college coaches that
he had to quit the wrestling squad to take
recruiting trips.

Ultimately, Manuel accepted the full
ride from Michigan, playing under legendary
coach Bo Schembechler. Greg Harden,
associate athletic director at Michigan,
recalls Manuel as the “warmest, funniest,
most charismatic character” he met on the
team in the fall of 1990.

“It's really unfair to tell a kid he'll be
a professional athlete, but every now and
then you know that one is destined for a
professional career. Warde's destiny for
football was pretty much written.”

Despite the heady experience of suiting
up for the Wolverines, Manuel describes
the passage from high school to college
as difficult. “Being a thousand miles from
home and going through the rigors academically
without having the structure
that I had [in high school], I didn't do all
the things I needed to do academically
my first year,” he admits. “Yeah, I had
dreams. But it wasn't necessarily because I
had dreams of being a pro athlete as much
as it was just not knowing how intense the
transition could be.”

These days, the cleat is on the other
foot: Any UB student athlete with faltering
grades earns a trip to Manuel's office.
As the academic progress of UB's student
athletes has improved, however, that happens
less and less.

In the fall of 2007, Bulls student athletes
as a group achieved the highest
GPA since 2004 and the second highest
since joining the MAC in 1999. The football
team posted the highest GPA in its
Division 1-A history.

“What I admire and respect about
Warde is his focus to developing the whole
student athlete so they have a great experience
at UB,” says women's tennis coach
Kathy Twist.

“When he took the position, he immediately
spent money on academics. He
made the study room more conducive to
learning, he redid the computer center for
our athletes in Alumni Arena, he bought
more computers, and he hired more learning
strategists and more tutors.

“Our retention of student athletes
needed to be improved. Instead of blaming
people or the system, he set out to find
appropriate solutions to retain our student
athletes. He always has a plan.”

Reinvention as a scholar

During Manuel's sophomore year at
Michigan, he sustained a neck injury that
caused numbness down his arm. By his
junior year, he had to give up football.

“It was devastating to him,” Harden
recalls. “There's a school of thought that
you can tough this kind of injury out, but
you know if you keep playing it's going to
get worse. So it was a tough decision, and
he had to make it himself. He had to reinvent
himself in his junior year and become
a scholar, and he pulled it off. The kid was
absolutely a stellar student.”

Manuel graduated in 1990, receiving
his bachelor's degree in general studies
with a concentration in psychology. Three
years later, he received a master's in social
work. From there, he was hired as an academic
adviser at Georgia Tech's Athletic
Association before being named its assistant
athletic director of academic affairs.

In June of 1996 Manuel returned to
his alma mater as an executive staff assistant
in the athletic department, being
promoted to assistant athletic director in
1998 and, two years later, an associate
athletic director. Although it wasn't the
sports career he'd envisioned for himself
as a young man, he realized that he'd
found his niche.

“I just loved the attitude and the focus
Michigan had on the combination of
academics and athletics, and I learned a
lot from it,” says Manuel, who received
an MBA while working there. “I realized
that I could really be helpful to a lot of
kids and help them grow and develop,
and do it through the love that I have of
athletics.”

According to education professor Percy
Bates, Michigan faculty's athletics representative,
one of Manuel's legacies from
that era was renaming the athletic department's
academic support program the academic
“success” program.

“It's a subtle difference, but it's a
meaningful one,” says Bates. “Warde
understands that even if you become a
well-known, well-paid athlete, it doesn't
last forever. He's a role model who has
considerable focus on life after athletics
and on becoming a full-fledged, participating
citizen.”

Persuasive champion of UB's program

In 2005—weeks after former NCAA president
Gene Corrigan issued a report identifying
the hiring of an athletic director
as key to UB's prospects in the MAC—President John B. Simpson was wading
through résumés of more than 40 “very
qualified” contenders for the position.
When he read Manuel's, he knew he'd
found the ideal candidate.

Three years later, Simpson describes
Manuel's effect on the athletics program
as “transformative.”

“He has been a directed, focused and
very strong leader. He's also very ambitious,
and I mean that in the most positive
way. He wants these teams to achieve in
the classroom and on the field, and he's
had very good results.”

As he meets with alumni and represents
UB to the community, Manuel has
proved himself a persuasive champion of
the program, adds Simpson. “He understands
the place and value and importance
of athletics in a university, so he's a very
credible salesperson for helping folks
understand why making an investment in
UB athletics is making an investment in
the university in the broader sense.”

In fact, under Manuel's leadership, two
of the athletics department's largest financial
gifts were secured: a $500,000 gift
from alumnus Robert Morris, BA '67, and
his wife, Carol, for a sports performance
center, and a $640,000 gift from Harold
Ortman, DDS '41, professor emeritus of
dentistry, to benefit the tennis program.

“It's easy for me to ask people to
invest,” says Manuel, who lives in
Williamsville with his wife, Chrislan, and
their 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old
son. “What makes me most proud is when
I ask people to invest in something and
tell them the intended result and it happens,
and they can see it happen.”

Manuel's next plan is to raise funds
for a field house where teams can practice
during inclement weather. For his part,
football coach Turner Gill doesn't doubt
that it will come to fruition.

“For a person to be here three years
and get the stability and consistency that
he has out of the athletic department is
outstanding,” says Gill, the nationally
respected former assistant coach from
Nebraska whom Manuel hired shortly
after arriving at UB. “Everyone is buying
into and accepting his vision and his winning
attitude.”

That includes student athletes, notes
Gill. “Whether at a swim meet or a wrestling
meet, he's there in the brunt of it.
Some ADs [athletic directors] are up in
the press box or they stop on the field, but
in the middle of the matches he's there—he's encouraging our coaches and our student
athletes.”

Indeed, when the women's tennis team
played in the NCAA championship held at
UCLA, Manuel stood in the tunnel leading
to the courts, high-fiving each player as
she passed.

“Ultimately, seeing the kids compete
and seeing kids have an opportunity to
take it to the next level and win championships
is probably the most enjoyable
aspect of my job,” he says.

And, as he looks toward the Bulls'
prospects, Manuel expects those opportunities
will become the norm rather than
the exception.

“The first year I came to UB, I heard,
‘It's not going to be successful at Buffalo.'
‘You just can't do it.' And I said, ‘Thank
you,' and I moved on. When people tell
me that you must not be concentrating on
academics if you're doing so well athletically,
I just say, ‘No. You can do both.'

“I came to UB because I believe in the
vision of this place, and I still do. What
drives me is producing success stories. It's
very seldom that anybody can nip away
at my positive attitude. I challenge you to
find someone around me who has a negative
view, because I don't want them.”

A former reporter for the Buffalo News,
Nicole Peradotto is a Buffalo-based freelance
writer/editor.

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